I'm a full-time teacher, but previously worked in journalism. I'd like to develop a side hustle writing about using walking to explore the history in London. My long-term goal is to write a short book or walking guide on whether I should start a blog as I want to be writing more frequently to sharpen my skills.

Well, Andrew, I'm going to use this whole desire of a side interest in producing a book about walking histories of London to test out our productivity perspective. If you are haphazardly busy in your teaching job, it is going to be very unlikely you are going to succeed with this endeavor.

You'll have moments of inspiration, other times where you feel like you have no leeway to work on it, the project will make some progress, and then because of haphazardly busy periods will disappear for months, you might sour on the idea, you might lose your momentum. On the other hand, if you have a productivity framework in place, if you feel like you really do have control over the various obligations and your time, and when you work on it, you're capturing, configuring, controlling your teaching responsibilities, now you have a shot at succeeding with one of these projects.

You can figure out, do I have time for this? Where is that time best placed? And then actually place that time in those locations. And there's all sorts of different options for how you might do this, but you're not going to be able to know what options are available or what is best until you really do have a framework in place in your professional life that is helping you control everything.

Now I'm going to give a particular suggestion. So assuming you do this, you get a control productivity system in place, you feel in control of your time and obligations. I was thinking about your specific project here, writing this book, Walking History, and your question in particular about, should you start a blog?

Is that going to be the right way to sharpen your skills and build this out? Well, my instinct is this project is probably a quality over quantity play. I think you want to be producing specific walking tours. Let's put the digital channel aside for now, but producing particular walking tours at a very high level.

So well-researched, either well videoed or photographed. You have a map that you can follow it. Not that often. Sometimes once every month or once every couple of months, but when you release one of these things, it's really, really high quality, really easy for people to follow and use. It seems really professional.

This is the like Mr. Beast or Tim Urban frequency of content production where it's not every three days, but the stuff they put out, they've made excellent. I think that's what you're looking for here. Be so good. The stuff should be so good. It can't be ignored. I think that's going to be the most fulfilling for you and be the best foundation for eventually then collecting these into a book.

The channel question, I'm not sure. I think if you just had a blog, sort of web 2.0 style, you had a domain and a WordPress blog that might be not enough given the way that digital media has evolved. You probably need some other sort of media involved here. I mean, YouTube could be a big player here.

You could have very well produced videos where you're actually doing this walking tour, maybe sub stack as opposed to just so people could subscribe and you get sent these walking tours. It would be a narrow band of people subscribing, but you would have a good band of followers. You could carefully put your toes in the professional social media.

Obviously, I'm not a big believer in spending people using social media as a source of personal distractions, something people are on on their own time just to sort of keep up with the world and be distracted, but an Instagram account, a professional Instagram account where it's just for you, whatever, posting the photos from your latest tours that you're working on as it builds up to you, then launching your latest tour on a website connected to sub stack.

I don't know the right mix there. You probably need a more heterogeneous mix than just a blog, but that would be my guess is that once you get control over your teaching life, you have that productivity framework in place. You'll be able to build a rhythm where you build up to once every couple of months, a great tour.

I would imagine you do, you put aside a Saturday to really explore and scout things out, and then you have some sessions to do your background research and writing, and then you have another session a few weeks later where you actually go to do the video or photographs for the very nice actual tour put together.

I would also say, don't hesitate. I wouldn't hesitate too much about spending some money on this as well because you're getting, you will get great satisfaction out of producing these really good tours. So if you gather all this information and then you're hiring, you're paying 200 bucks to an online contractor to then put it all together digitally in the right format so that you don't have to spend 30 hours trying to figure out how to do that.

I think that's a very good investment of money, those type of strategic investments. So that would be my guess. Quality over quantity is the way to build not only towards a book, but just to enjoy this as you go along. But none of this is possible unless you leave haphazard business and really feel like you have your arms around your day job, you have that productivity framework in place.

I don't know. What other channels do people use, Jesse? If you were, I mean, there's sort of people who've been grandfathered into just having their own blogs like Marginalia, which used to be Brain Pickings. I think Tim Urban with Wait But Why, Mr. Money Mustache. I don't know. Starting from scratch though, it's difficult, I think.

I agree with you. I think you need multiple mediums. Yeah. I think the key is just don't let your professional use of a medium be your excuse to have your personal life devolve into consuming that medium. It's like you can do the Ryan Holiday thing and have stoic quotes on Twitter, Instagram photos of these sort of cool places you are and these videos that you've made without actually being on Twitter yourself and reading what other people said, without actually being on Instagram and scrolling it all the time.

So there's definitely a professional mindset that I think helps there. You can also, I mean, he was saying how he wanted to work on his writing. You can also do that with both mediums for sure. Yeah. And see, I'm not as worried as he seems to be in sharpening his writing skills because he's a full-time teacher with a background in journalism.

And the type of writing he's doing is describing history for a walking tour. I'm sure he's perfectly capable of doing that. His craft is where it needs to be. If he was a 22-year-old college student who has never really written professional before, okay, you got to get some training to get above that amateur bar.

He's already well above that amateur bar and the writing he's doing is not, the value in what he's doing is not in the quality of the writing. It just has to be non-amateur writing. I bet he can already do that. Yeah. Good point. All right. What do we got next?

All right. Next question's from Ruby, a 35-year-old banker from London. I'm taking a few weeks off to recover from burnout due to a period where my responsibilities kept increasing. What would you recommend to do to make the most of my time away from work? So Ruby, the productivity perspective here is that if all you do during your time off is recharge and then just go back into this environment where you were before, give it six months, you'll be back in the same place.

What is important here, this is what I would do with my time off, is figure out what is the productivity framework I'm going to put in place so that I have clarity into all of the obligations entering my world. None of it is being held only in my mind.

I am configuring. I can see what it is, what type of work do I have at different parts. This is the traditional facing the productivity dragon. And then I control my time on different timescales. Here's what I'm doing today. Here's what I'm doing this week. Here's how these projects fit.

Now here's the goal here. Not that with this productivity framework, you can optimize your time enough that the workload that burnt you out before you can now handle. That's not the goal. The goal instead is clarity. Clarity about what's on your plate. Clarity about what is reasonable to be on your plate.

Clarity about proposing this, this and this makes sense, this, this and this is too much. The productivity system, a good productivity system can give you the confidence you need to advocate for yourself. Now again, this I think is one of the, one of the insidious side effects of rejecting productivity because you associate it with this optimization over our culture is that ironically it is exactly what your employer wants you to do.

We think about it. Oh no, the productivity is somehow part of this base superstructure sort of early 20th century Marxist approach of, of trying to exploit more labor from the, from the, the, the proletariat or something like this. Right? That's the old grad school, blah, blah, blah approach to it.

Actually knowing what you're doing, knowing what's on your plate, having a extreme clarity about exactly your workplace, seeing the matrix of the obligations being thrown at you with clarity. That's actually what in a lot of these overwhelmed situations, your employer wouldn't want, because it means you can come back and say, I know this is crazy.

We need to cut this in half. Let me tell you why. You know, I have my arms around everything and I'm very careful. I run my schedule very carefully and I do very good work. This is 50% too much. And I have confidence in that conviction. If you instead fall back into haphazard busyness because you're trying to reject the, the hustle culture, et cetera, you are at the mercy of these employers.

It's just all stuff. We're all busy. You got a bunch of stuff. Why aren't you doing work? Why are you complaining? You're either going to burn yourself out again and again, or give them excuse to fire you. So productivity can actually be what you need to prevent and push back against overload.

Right? So this is, again, the whole autonomy frame for productivity is having your arms around your obligations is what allows you to do so many different things. And this is one of the things you can do is it allows you to stand up, allows you to stand up and say with a clear voice and conviction enough.

This is too much. I know it's too much. You know that. I know that now this is my, this is what's reasonable and this is what I'm going to do. And when people know that you have your act together, when it comes to these sort of productivity systems, it's much harder for them to push back against that.

So that's what I would say, rest and recharge, but also get your systems fired up so that when you come back, you're no longer at the mercy of like whatever junk your employer is just throwing at you and hoping you won't notice that it's completely unreasonable. Yeah. I like what you said at the end of the deep dive to about having options.

Yeah. Yeah. Productivity is about that's the autonomy frame. Yeah. If you don't have control over all the different obligations orbiting you in your professional life, you are at the mercy of whim, your boss's mood, your personality, what you can get away with and basically will probably just be stressed out.

I mean, or you could be okay. Like maybe you just whatever, become kind of misanthropic and, and resentful and people want to deal with it and you kind of find a way to make it work, but it's all just, you're drifting towards some sort of steady state. There's probably going to be a non-optimal equilibrium, but when you know everything that's going on, you can stand back and say this, this, and this is the problem.

And if I move this, I can't do those. I got to take this off my plate and no, no, no, of course, no, of course, no, of course, no. Yes. I'll do this. Here's what I'm going to do. And it just makes all the difference. You can do so much if you have a good productivity system and you can't do almost anything without it.

So it's not like I'm burnt out or I'm, you know, quitting the workforce and hoping that people subscribe to my sub stack. There's got to be something in between those two. All right. Let's keep rolling. What do we have next? All right. Next question's from Rito, 23 year old from India.

I have too many interests in my life. I have so many choices. It's crippling and I end up doing nothing. My question is how do I learn to prioritize? So Rito, I included this question because it helps show that the productivity perspective is also relevant to your life outside of work.

It's also relevant to your leisure life. So haphazard busyness can cripple you like it's happening here in your leisure life in the same way that it can in your professional life, especially like Rito, you're young, you're 23 years old, you have all this time and all this potential. And there's so many different things you can do that you bounce from one thing to another and nothing's making progress.

Your brain will eventually stop trying to generate motivation. I've written about this before, Rito, what's really happening here, if you want my opinion, is that our brain is very good at evaluating potential plans. Is this objective worth it? And do I have reason to believe this plan is going to work?

Our brain asks and answers those two questions all the time. We're very good at that. This is something that is bred into our paleolithic path. Those mechanisms, when it doesn't trust you really know what you're doing, when it doesn't trust that there's a plan here that makes sense, that's going to lead to some sort of mastery or a highly fulfilling outcome.

It says, nope. And what does it feel like when your plan evaluation apparatus in your brain says, no, it feels like procrastination. You can't summon motivation because there is a system in our brain that generates the feelings of motivation towards action and has to believe what you're doing. So if your leisure life is crippled with or ridden with haphazard busyness, it's like, I'm not going to just start this whatever by a video camera to become the next Martin Scorsese, because you don't know what you're doing here.

There's no plan here. This is one of like 15 different things you have. That is why you have this feeling of I can't do anything. I feel crippled. It's because it's too haphazard. It's too busy. So you can bring a productivity framework into your leisure life to get your arms around this, to start to be selective, to start to be intentional about what you spend your time on.

And in doing so, you're going to end up in a much better place. So let me give you a particular suggestion here, just to plant a seed. So one way you might structure more intentionally your life outside of work would be a four part focus. I've talked about this before.

Three routines and one project in one time. So the three routines that just figure out how to have going in the background would probably be some sort of fitness health routine. This is eating and exercise. This is foundational. Let's get that going background, some sort of reading routine. I'm reading on a regular basis.

I'm moving away from just distraction. My mind is learning how to actually remain focused on complex thoughts. You're going to develop as a human being. You're going to develop as a, as a thinker. We did a podcast episode a few weeks ago on how to become a reader was called the joys of the reading life.

It's probably like two 38. Yeah. Yeah. Episode two 38. You can watch that. Your third routine I would say to put in place foundationally is some sort of community routine. These things you do on a regular basis that keep you connected and serving your friends, your family, other people in the communities that you're involved with.

Get background routines for those three things going. That's just foundational. You can tweak those, but you should always on a regular basis. Those things are just woven into the fabric of your life. Okay. And then one major project. And then do that major project till you get to a great milestone that you can swap in another major project.

So just one major project at a time, spend six months on it, spend a year on it. I don't really care. You're young. You're 23. You have more time than you think. So this is just one particular suggestions of how you might establish a more intentional approach to your leisure life, but, but having routines for the things that are foundational to a life well live and then pursuing one thing at a time until a good point, giving that your full attention that for example, works really well.

And it's the type of thing that you're not going to get to until you get more intentional about your time.